Intimate food

It’s not about measurements, a pre-meditated process, or about perfectly chopped vegetables, for  Nigella Lawson, cooking is all about instinct. At a time when cooking is regarded as a complex process where you have chefs discovering molecular gastronomy, Nigella’s cooking is soulful, simple, and yet appealing. “I feel what I want to convey is my enthusiasm for food. I am not here to present a mechanical way of cooking food because if you don’t get fired up with enthusiasm, I feel it’s very hard and I need to show people how simple it is to cook.”

Nigella feels that many a time there’s an awful lot of mythologising about cooking. “Cooking can be very complicated, but it needn’t be. The idea of cooking simple recipes on television is to instill some confidence in amateur or aspiring cooks who otherwise feel intimidated after watching other cookery shows,” she adds. Nigella Lawson’s series on TLC, Nigella Kitchen, is just that. Here, she fixes up a meal for herself, family and friends in no time, yet it looks delectable. As you watch her share tips and strategies to solve kitchen quandaries; make some chicken fajitas, pork knuckles that are beer-braised with apples and potatoes or a black squink risotto, you know that these dishes will definitely make an impact on your dinner table.

For Nigella, life revolves around food. She hails from a food-obsessed family, which she passionately talked about when she wrote her first book, How To Eat, in 1998. She began her career as a scribe and later on realised her immense potential to make it big as a food writer and a television star. Since then, Nigella’s infectious passion for food and her voluptuous curves have made her a household name in the UK, later in the US, and now in India too. What’s even more striking is that Nigella isn’t a trained chef and is proud to be so. “I am not a chef or a trained cook. I am just a home cook. But you see when I say that, the world thinks I am being modest. I am not. I don’t think being a chef is better than being a home cook. Although I love going to restaurants and I admire chefs, my knowledge of the history of food and of cooking is at home. I guess that’s what helps me connect with my viewers; people watching me are home cooks too,” remarks Nigella.

Another facet to this domestic goddess is her breezy and warm approach while she cooks in front of the camera. Her cooking or her conversations with the viewer have never seemed contrived, which she agrees to. “I always try and share the story behind the recipe. I want the viewers to know why I chose that particular recipe, what it means to me, where it comes from in my life or in my travels. So I try to, in a way, make it an intimate conversation.”

She is pleased that through Nigella Kitchen, she has shared a recipe that she has never written before. “It is my mother’s way of cooking chicken with water, vegetables and seasoning. It’s not a soup or chicken but somewhere in-between. In a sense these unfashionable, perhaps not entirely photogenic ways of cooking get very ignored in modern lives. I called it ‘my mother’s praised chicken’ as it was half way between braised and poached and it’s not a food or a recipe that people see on television or in books anymore.” 

Nigella has been told or rather questioned that she is very flirtatious with the camera. But she tries not to read such reviews as she believes they are corrupting. “I don’t pay attention to good reviews or bad. The great thing to ward against is self-consciousness. I do feel I have an intimate manner but I certainly don’t need to be coquettish. What matters to me is my relationship with my viewers and readers.”

She also points out that television, while being an artificial medium, is an incredible detector of phoniness too. “You have to be what you are. If you pretend anything, it’s detectable. When I do television, I don’t have a script. I babble on. If you are honest, people will react to you honestly.” 

It’s this quality that makes Nigella such a beloved cook. She is unapologetic about the dollops of butter she uses in her cake or the divine blue cheese she uses to dress her baked potatoes. And as the end credits of her programme roll on the screen, you see Nigella raiding her fridge for a quick midnight snack and realise that she is here to tell you that life is too short to live on calorie-controlled meals. It’s about savouring every meal, every ingredient you possibly can.

As she puts it, “I don’t have my hair and makeup done everyday, and unfortunately, I don’t have someone with a very flattering light beaming it on me. But nevertheless, I do think I am what I am.”